Hugh le Despenser - husband of Isabel/Isabella de Beauchamp - called by history "The Elder" and his son Hugh "The Younger" have arguably been classed as two of the most evil nobles in British history as advisors to the despotic King Edward II. Both were executed for their crimes in late 1326 by Roger de Mortimer and his lover Queen Isabella. The Despenser/Beauchamp marriage produced 4 children, 3 of them were in the More (Mayflower Passenger) ancestry, Philip being one of those.

"By 1320 his greed was running free. Hugh seized the Welsh lands of his wife's inheritance, ignoring the claims of his two brothers-in-law. He forced Alice de Lacy, Countess of Lincoln, to give up her lands, cheated his sister-in-law Elizabeth de Clare out of Gower and Usk, and allegedly had Lady Baret's arms and legs broken until she went insane. He also supposedly vowed to be revenged on Roger Mortimer because Mortimer's grandfather had murdered Hugh's grandfather, and once stated though probably in jest that he regretted he could not control the wind. By 1321 he had earned many enemies in every stratum of society, from Queen Isabella to the barons to the common people. There was even a bizarre plot to kill Hugh by sticking pins in a wax likeness of him. Finally the barons prevailed upon King Edward and forced Hugh and his father into exile in 1321. His father fled to Bordeaux, and Hugh became a pirate in the English Channel, "a sea monster, lying in wait for merchants as they crossed his path". ...

Philip le Despenser of Parlington, etc d 24.09.1313 shown by BE1883 as a generation later

There is confusion concerning the various families called Despencer, a name taken from the position of a dispensator or steward. BE1883 appears to mix up, or at least makes it easy for people to view as closely connected, two of the most important. We show them both on this page to help clear the position with regard to what various sources report. On the second of these families, in Volume IV page 259 note c, TCP reports as follows: "Their pedigree has been distorted by the unscrupulous efforts of many heralds and genealogists to derive the Spencers of Althorpe from an illustrious origin: with the result that 1 these Despensers, who appear to have been dispensatores of the Earls of Chester, 2 the Despensers of King's Stanley, co. Gloucester, who were dispensatores Regi, and 3 the above-named now ducal family of Spencer, who emerge from obscurity, as wealthy graziers, towards the end of the 15th century, have been associated in a single pedigree in which "fact and fiction are cunningly intertwined." "